1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image recording apparatus for recording image data on a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
For example, the digital camera is known as a conventional image recording apparatus for recording image data on a recording medium. As a recording medium installed in a digital camera increases in capacity, the number of instances that multiple people such as family members or friends share one recording medium of the digital camera increases. In this case, if the digital camera has a function of selecting recording destination folders, each user can select a recording destination folder using this function before shooting so that image data will be classified by user and recorded on the recording medium on a user-by-user basis.
However, such a digital camera allows everyone to reproduce (display), erase, and copy any image data classified by user. Therefore, even if a user does not want other users to access some of his or her image data, such as image data that the user does not want to show to other users or to be erased without his or her consent, the access cannot be prevented.
On the other hand, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-288239 discloses a server system in which a virtual partition is created in a storage and allocated to a group of registered users. In this server system, the usage conditions of the virtual partition are set on a per-group basis, and an exclusive access control is provided within logged-in multiple users in the group corresponding to the virtual partition.
The access control described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-288239 may be considered as a solution to the above-mentioned problem with the digital camera. However, the access control is suitable for a file-sharing system on a network, but not for use in an image recording apparatus such as the above-mentioned digital camera because its architecture is too complicated to implement for such an image recording apparatus.